Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses. However, some leaked MediaDefender emails show that may be a huge exaggeration. 'I also want to state that I am not for the illegal sharing of files. I am absolutely against it. I just want to make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers. I have a feeling they aren't fair at all. '"

Comments

Bogus

[neokushan]

The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses.

This is a bogus claim anyway, everyone knows college kids (aka Students) are piss poor and couldn't afford to buy the music even if they didn't download it.
Now they're just piss poor and bored.

Re:Bogus

[iminplaya]

Instead of getting bored, they should be getting pissed. They are throwing away an opportunity to overcome a great challenge. Later, they'll be raising their families and not care about such silliness anymore, and of course keep reelecting the same politicians who brought all this upon them because they were promised "foreclosure relief" or victory in Iraq, or they'll either ban or mandate gay marriage, drugs, flag burning, bla bla bla. And the next generation will say something naughty...*sigh* Now I'm bored.

Re:Bogus

[p0tat03]

I call bullshit wishful thinking.

I am in college, and I've been to the campuses of MANY others, for one reason or another, and while it's true that you've got some college students eking by on savings and loans, being very judicious in their spending, the vast majority are supported by middle-class parents, and have plenty of disposable income.

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright. The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to. I'll leave the psychological analysis of the why to people better qualified than I, but it is undeniable that the average college student thinks nothing wrong with piracy. It's perceived as a victimless crime.

Seriously, if you can spend thousands boozing yourself up each year, you can't make the excuse that you're too poor to buy DVDs.

Re:Bogus

[kamapuaa]

This is a bogus claim anyway, everyone knows college kids (aka Students) are piss poor and couldn't afford to buy the music even if they didn't download it.

When I was in college plenty students had large CD collections - that was when Napster was just getting on the scene, though. Have you ever been to college?

Anyway, being poor doesn't give a right to pirate/steal.

Re:Bogus

[LordLucless]

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright.

Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.

Re:Bogus

[acherusia]

No, indeed, while I am no fan of the MAFIAA, there IS a very real problem with our young people and their perceptions on copyright. The general consensus is that if they didn't have to filch if off a store shelf, it's morally a-ok, and this mentality pervades every college campus I've ever been to. I'd have to agree with that, but it's also very easy to see why. One party has unilaterally declared a position that everyone can agree is downright absurd (and if you don't think that $15 dollar CDs, a copyright term extending multiple generations past the death of the creator, DRM stopping even fair use use of most music and movies is absurd, I'd like to see what is). In the absence of a reasonable outline of fair use, people create their own version. Unlike the RIAA's, it lacks legal force, but, like the RIAA's, it's to their own advantage. If the music and movie industries hadn't tried to screw over their consumers so hard, then their customers probably wouldn't be screwing them over right back.

Re:Bogus

[Grakun]

Most people aren't pirating as some form of protest for draconian anti-consumer policies, they pirate because it beats paying money for it.

You're trying to simplify it into something very narrow. There are more things that influence people's behavior than it simply saving money. Otherwise, these people who don't want to waste money would not be listening to nearly as much music, and certainly wouldn't be running out to buy albums they've never heard from bands they've never heard. I know people who like listening to their music through their high end stereo system, or on their computer while they work, that have wasted $15-20 on a new album only to find out that due to the "clever" copy protection on the disc, they are unable to listen to it. Then there are the windows machines that were infected with rootkits, the macs that locked up and refused to reboot or eject the malicious audio cd. Not to mention the people who have a different taste in music, preferring only a few songs from different albums. The biggest contributing factor is probably how "pirated music" tends to have far less problems, than trying to find a legal way to pay for an album and still be able to use it as easily as the mp3 you could have already downloaded by now. Not everyone is that computer literate. Most of the users I know are only capable of using a few simple programs successfully. They don't want to have to learn a variety of systems that individually are more complicated as well as costing them money, without any guarantee that they'll even be able to listen to it on the device they intend to listen to it on.

The vast majority of the world, when it comes to piracy, are cheap bastards. I know guys who pay $2K for a laptop but refuse to pay for a copy of Windows.

Something seems fishy here. A cheap bastard who pays $2,000 for a laptop from one of the limited number of companies that sells it without a Windows license, then pirates Windows because he can't afford it? Don't get me wrong, I know lots of people who pirate windows. Typically, people who are building a custom computer themselves or people who don't want the other 10-15gigs of trial software that came pre-installed with Windows on their machine. I haven't heard of many people building their own custom laptops, though. Most laptops are bought with a windows license already included. What reason would people have for pirating windows if they already own windows? Unless they don't want the other 10gigs of crap that came pre-installed and don't have a plain disc to reinstall with, why would they be pirating Windows? Are you sure it's not just because it's easier than trying to find the long and hard way of accomplishing the same task with the least chance of breaking the law?

They are vaguely aware of a musician that they're ripping off, but their feeble minds do not permit them to hold onto that train of thought long enough to feel guilt.

Every musician I've ever met has wanted people to listen to, and enjoy, their music. They like the idea of their music reaching more people. But, then again, those are just musicians. Some of them talk about how their publisher is ripping them off. I could be wrong, but I tend to believe the people I know personally over what someone I don't know says.

Have you ever been to a public place or a pub where someone had a TV with cable/satellite TV? What about a local concert or open mic where bands played music that they didn't write themselves? Do you realize how many of those are more extreme infringements of these exact same copyrights? Then there are schools, who very rarely license every copyrighted melody that they teach children to perform during public events. What do you do when you're at a restaurant and you hear someone beginning to sing The Birthday Song. I can't imagine the kind of frustration you must put up with on a daily basis, seeing all of these blatant copyright infringements everywhere. If you get so upset about people privately listening to musi

There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[compumike]

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

I wouldn't worry about it. Its easy to be idealistic when you have nothing to protect. They'll sing a very different tune when there's money involved. LOL

Remember, the hippies eventually turned into the very Establishment they despised.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[ricebowl]

If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

You say 'subvert,' I suggest 'revise.' If a large portion of a community disregards the copyright laws as currently written, does that imply that a large portion of a community needs to be punished/made to pay, or that the copyright laws need to be re-written?

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

Actually, the popularity of a law is its /very basis/ for legitimacy, at least in a democratic society. Who gets to decide what policy can "better service society" except the very members of that society? The law should reflect common morality, not some notion three guys in a room decided was best.

Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition?

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

Some people also care about being credited for their work.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition? Prohibition, otherwise known as the Eighteenth Amendment, required 2/3rds of both houses of Congress, and 3/4ths of the states to pass it(Rhode Island was the only state to reject it). It was hardly the minority moral position. That said, it was subverted by the minority position, but not before we got the wonderfully powerful FBI to fight them. It was ultimately repealed with the Twenty First Amendment after twenty some years as citizens grew tired of the racketeering and other problems it was causing.

Also, I know it's common to confuse democracy and republicanism today, but we are a republic precisely to protect the rights of the minority from a simple plurality. As prohibition shows, it doesn't always stop the political winds of the day, but it's far better than simply changing things on the fickleness of the voters at any given time. For as much as you and I dislike the tactics of the RIAA and/or MPAA, remember, they're in bed with the rest of the media and could just as easily start a movement against something you hold dear (say, open source software) if we were a true democracy.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll, but are you defending the institution of slavery? The Holocaust? People can be morally wrong in large numbers.

Property is a fundamental natural right. Just because it is easier to steal music off the Internet and not get caught doesn't mean it is any more moral than stealing any other property.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[azrider]

I believe my arguments against copyright, to which I came after many years of scepticism and pro-IP attitude, are sensible.

Ok, try this on for size:

I spend a year (or more) writing a novel. My income depends on the advance my publisher gives me (if I am lucky), as well as royalties from additional sales. The novel is published and put in the book stores, priced at $25.
You come along and copy it, then sell it in the same book stores for $20.
I now have to pay my publisher back the advance due to lack of sales.

Now, is copyright good or bad?

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[QuoteMstr]

You have a point. I'm not advocating mob rule. A representative government should act like a shock absorber for democracy and prevent sudden fits of passion from leading to bad decisions. Arguably, Prohibition was a failure of that damping mechanism.

But what you're missing here is that society itself defines right and wrong. We think slavery is wrong today, but when it was popular, it wasn't considered wrong. When public opinion changed hard enough, for long enough, slavery ended. (Granted, a little less elegantly than we would have liked.)

You can't judge a past society by our own morals. What are we supposed to do, live our lives based on what people 200 years from now will think? What if we guess wrong?

I don't know why you brought the holocaust into this discussion. That program was a secret project concocted by an insane, totalitarian government. It was not a popular movement.

Also, copyright is not property. At best, it's a pragmatic bargain between artists and the public, and it terms are no more fixed, and no more sacred, than the income tax rate.

If the terms of this contract really did constitute a "fundamental" right, what would give Disney, err, Congress the authority to extend copyright by 20 years, every 20 years?

Point is, like you like it or not, we live a representative democracy. And public opinion is rapidly shifting in favor of weakening copyright. If those in power continue to ignore that shift, they will not long remain in power.

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[bzipitidoo]

You're thinking too narrowly. You see us as working against our own best interests, undermining the very thing, copyright, that will empower us to make a living. But copyright is only a means, and a poor one at that. We need a better means. We aren't going to get a better means as long as we keep fighting over the impossible task of how to enforce copyright rather than hash out and try other ways. Another way, much older than copyright, and with plenty of its own problems, is patronage. Mozart didn't depend on copyright. Far from seeing copyright as the One True Way to earn a living in the arts and sciences, we actually see it and similar law as serious barriers, constantly draining resources and distracting attention towards unprofitable legal exercises.

copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright

Ahh, you bring up the old assertion that copyleft needs copyright. No it doesn't. Yes, copyleft makes it difficult for someone to make a few changes to gain a competitive advantage, then keep it all secret and compete unfairly. Copyright law is merely the handiest tool to stop that kind of cheating. If there was no copyright law, such a tactic would still be unethical, and could be specifically outlawed, in the same way that the 14th and 15th Amendments outlaw specific tricks used to disenfranchise the newly freed. The 13th Amendment ban on slavery doesn't depend on slavery to uphold the principle that there shouldn't be slavery! The GPL doesn't need copyright any more than Lincoln needed slavery or (what the heck, I've already Godwinned this, may as well make it official), Churchill needed Hitler. Liberate the information!

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[CodeBuster]

Yes, most of us do not disagree completely with notion of copyright as a concept, but rather the particularly onerous and unbalanced implementation which has emerged in the first world in general and the United States in particular from about 1975 onward. Copyright is supposed to strike a balance between producers and consumers but how is it balanced to say that all of the works copyrighted in a single human lifetime will not be enjoyed by that same person in the public domain in his lifetime? In fact the balance has tilted so far in favor of the copyright holders that people in general, and college students in particular, are in open rebellion against a system which they perceive is no longer fair. They choose to act outside they system because the laws are so broken and the deck so stacked against them with regard to having those laws changed.

maybe there are other explanations

[petes_PoV]

• students have found ways to not be discovered
• the students have got all the stuff they want
• there's nothing much worth downloading at present
• (my favourite) The RIAA are getting tired of the "war" so they're engineering a victory. Look! our stats say we've won - we can stop now.
• possibly the stats are over the summer, when the colleges were empty

Just like house prices, you can't draw any real conclusions from a single data point. Give it a year and see if there's still a downward trend or if this was just a blip

I wonder.

[palegray.net]

I wonder how many students at technical colleges and universities are using BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs, free software packages, etc...

I know that's what I use it for (no, I'm not kidding).

Business plan

[PPH]

1. Find a bunch of corporate PHBs who fear new technology will disrupt their market share.
2. Put together statistics showing them how much money is slipping away.
3. Collect fees from them for a service that will reduce these losses.
4. Put together new statistics showing the reduction in losses, thanks to their generous contributions.
5. ????
6. Profit!

As a University Student...

[RSA7474]

I have been downloading using the Gnutella network, newsgroups, usenet, and torrents since early highschool.. but I am an exception; being a computer science major.

Gnutella market became huge when I was in highschool.. which was Napster... that is when most students learned and starting using this tool. It has really been the last few years that most people I know are using other means of downloading besides Gnutella network; but still a majority do that are not computer literate. I have taught several peers how to use torrents and most now not use it.

I don't know anyone that does not do any illegal downloading; but this is generally music/videos. I can see the majority of illegal music/video downloading being students as most do not have the funds, or care enough to pay for the music. Most adult music is generally mainstream and thus bought from mainstream MPAA and RIAA suppliers, being HMV, Walmart, etc.. A large percentage of students music will be the TOP billboard hits but general interest in non-mainstream music is generally more prevalent in comparison to adult; thus being where a majority of music downloading and sharing comes into effect.

From my understanding and evaluation of peers, is that most know the dangers of illegal downloading and know that some sort of precaution is needed. As the majority of suits against illegal downloading are against users of Limewire, Ares or other various p2p applications; most see torrents as a safer practice. So to observe this decline is normal, as most adults I know that download music illegally don't even know what torrents are and have been slower in approaching p2p; and I generally find that the adult generation like to keep what feels more comfortable to them instead of trying the "newest" thing.

The only real way to combat this generation of downloading is to partner with the ISP's because only they can really throttle the connections and stop this. Too many services allow options such as RC4 encryption making it almost virtually impossible for the RIAA and MPAA to attack; and its almost hopeless to attack a handful of millions. Fortunately for the RIAA and MPAA this is almost becoming a reality as this YouTube generation is pushing the envelope.. I use to have bandwidth of ~3.4 mbps, but a general bandwidth of 1 mbps is now more common.

zOMG - Student numbers drop in summer

[Anonymous Coward]

Shocking! The numbers quoted in the articles show a steep drop in June and July, having reached a peak in midwinter.

Re:Actually...

[alphaseven]

Plus, it really only deals with the Gnutella network, whereas most of the traffic nowadays would probably be using Bittorrent.

I think we're also seeing a shift away from P2P and towards file hosting sites like Megaupload/Badongo/Zshare/Rapidshare etc, especially for newer albums.

You have to wonder...

[i_liek_turtles]

...why the porn industry isn't bitching nearly as much as the MAFIAA when they constitute around 90% of internet piracy.

Copyright is good...if you're the the publisher.

[Card Zero]

Copyright laws are not, and never have been, about protecting the livelihoods of authors or artists. They protect the interests of centralized distribution, which is rapidly going the way of the dodo thanks to the Internet.

Your publisher really wants you to think copyright is the only thing protecting you from starvation. The truth is that artists and authors made decent livings long before copyright laws came into being. Furthermore, the artists and authors who work outside the copyright model today can still do pretty well for themselves.

The idea that you need a publisher in order to sell a book is strong evidence of copyright's badness.

Re:Problem solved.

[Anonymous Coward]

And every one pirates music.

Re:Problem solved.

[blast3r]

"This guy is an idiot

I realize some of the EDU IP addresses may be from a private NAT (Network Address Translation) which enables multiple hosts on a private network to access the Internet using a single public IP address. It is safe to say the numbers are probably a bit higher than the data shows but I wouldn't imagine it would be significantly higher.
My 10000 student school has only a few dozen IPs. Yeah, a "bit higher"."

This is the point I was making. I know it is higher but how much higher? Do you have a list of all the Universities that use NAT? How many of those universities ban P2P? If all using NAT also ban P2P then they aren't even in the numbers at all. Without proper numbers it is all speculation and that is why I wrote the blog. I was hoping to spark some discussion and who knows maybe someone reading this will like to dive in and get 'real' numbers. It is still going to be hard to get a number of 'infringers', however.